Video conference?

SlickShughes

I moved to the West Coast a year ago, but my D&D group is still back east. We play about once a month, and we were using a piece of software called Oovoo to video conference for RPing. Of course, just when we got the system working perfectly, Oovoo switched from free beta to pay service. Any suggestions on something similar, also in the free range? We've already looked some, and found a few web solutions, but they tend to be laggy, and several of the others I found make me feel.. dirty. I don't want people wandering into our RP chat room looking for elf porn.

Vivixenne

Yahoo Messenger lets you broadcast your video to as many people as you like at once. That should work and from my experience it's not too laggy... though I guess it depends on how many of you there are.

SlickShughes

I had given some thought to that one, but I wasn't sure if it handled voice as well. I suppose even if it doesn't, we could teamspeak it.

There's five of us, including the DM

Vivixenne

If you have a strong internet connection it should be all right. It's the one program I can think of that lets you fire off good quality-video between a bunch of people without lagging like crazy (i.e., MSN).

Skype doesn't do video conferencing, otherwise I'd recommend THAT. (Could still make for a good voice conferencing program, it lets you add up to 9 people in one Skype call.)

But yeah if you pair Yahoo Messenger with Vent/TS, you should be okay.